Wisconsin's chapter of Deep Green Resistance

Erik Lindberg of Transition Milwaukee recently posted a good deconstruction of several common “progressive” fallacies around climate change. Climate change is a systemic problem created by our high consumption way of life, and can’t be solved while maintaining that way of life. Liberals and progressives often blame Republicans or conservatives for getting in the way of solutions, but the solutions on the table are ridiculously inadequate to address the issue and constitute another form of denial.

Unfortunately, Myth 6: “There is Nothing I Can Do” only discusses personal reduction in consumption, not the organized resistance necessary to stop the destructive system of industrial civilization. For a much more thorough treatment of “what I can do”, read the Deep Green Resistance strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare. Otherwise, though, this is an excellent analysis.

The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth. In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider. This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use. The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been. While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class. In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.

Deep Green Resistance member Will Falk will speak and fund raise in Milwaukee for the BC, Canada Unis’tot’en Camp. The Camp is blockading construction of multiple pipelines from tar sands and shale gas projects, an excellent example of strategic aboveground action towards the goals of DGR’s Decisive Ecological Warfare. Please spread the word, and come out in support if you possibly can!

Almost every Sunday, Derrick Jensen interviews an activist, biophile scientist, land restorationist, or other person similarly engaged in building a culture of resistance. The interviews are always worth listening to, packed with interesting information and insights drawn out by Jensen’s experienced questions. The interviews have always been available as mp3 downloads or audio streams from PRN.FM (you can also browse just the interviews related to Deep Green Resistance).

We’ve now made Resistance Radio available on youtube as audio with a still image of the interviewee, accessible to those who prefer to browse youtube or want to add the episodes into playlists. We’ll keep adding new interviews as they’re released. See them all at the Deep Green Resistance youtube channel, and please share these important conversations widely!

Join Lierre Kieth, writer, radical feminist, food activist and environmentalist as she speaks on civilization’s violence to the earth, male violence against women, and the need for serious resistance to both.

This event will take place at Lawrence University (Steitz Hall Room 102), located at 711 E. Boldt Way in Appleton, Wisconsin, on Sunday, April 17st starting at 1:00 p.m. This is a free event and is part of Greenfire‘s Earth Week speaking series.

Members of Deep Green Resistance from across the region will be in attendance and staffing a booth which we encourage you to stop at to pick up literature and learn how to get involved in our efforts.

Join Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin for a resistance-oriented speaking and music event on Saturday, January 26th, 2013, beginning at 3:00pm, at the Wilmar Center in Madison, WI, located at 953 Jenifer st.

Indigenous activists and their allies are hitting the road in an effort to bring knowledge to the people. The tour’s Wisconsin stop will feature speaking and music aimed at telling the truth about this invader culture and its wholesale destruction of Mother Earth. In the end, it will ask those in the audience if they will warrior up and fight back for Mother Earth. It will do this through speeches by people who are on the ground already fighting back and with Hip Hop music that promotes the same message.

The Warrior Up Resistance Tour features a variety of activists and artists. Included is the radical indigenous music group Savage Family, Lakota activist Olowan Martinez, Coastal Salish activist Queen Sascheen, and Deep Green Resistance member and Latino activist T.R. McKenzie.

For the past several months, the Wisconsin Action Group of the Deep Green

Resistance movement has been building it’s own capacity and helping the international movement with campaigns and projects.

We recognize that one of our major goals as a chapter of the larger DGR movement is to simultaneously support DGR as a whole and bring the movement to our locale. Without a strong international movement, local resisters would have little support in their efforts. Yet, without resistance happening locally, the more broad structure would be irrelevant and ineffective.

In Wisconsin news, our group recently set up a literature table at Earthfest, an annual environmental festival in Sheboygan, WI. The mission of Earthfest is as follows:

Since 1990, Earthfest’s mission is to provide a joyful, annual, free family festival in Sheboygan to promote community spirit and a healthy environment through music, art, education, lectures, stories, demonstrations, and local foods.

From behind our table, we engaged in conversation with several folks about our organization and perspective. As is predictable given the tone of the so-called environmental movement in the United States, many whom we spoke with were not of the mind that resistance is even a possibility. They know the problems, but don’t know what we can honestly do to stop them. This is a major reason why DGR Wisconsin participated in Earthfest; we want to bring a radical analysis into the environmental milieu. The festival now being over, and many of our pamphlets seeing the fresh eyes of it’s attendees, it’s hard to say what impact our presence will have. Though, we will keep spreading the seeds of resistance and attempt to build a movement to save the planet.

Many thanks to organizers of Earthfest for putting the event on and allowing us to participate.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Enbridge, a beleaguered Canadian oil pipeline company, has spilled more than 50,000 gallons of light crude oil in rural Wisconsin — shortly after the company said it had implemented safety reforms after a massive 2010 spill in Michigan.

Officials for Alberta-based Enbridge Inc., one of the United States’ most vital suppliers of Canadian oil, said Friday’s spill has been contained by cleanup workers, who are now trying to repair and restart the 24-inch pipeline known as Line 14, which carries more than 300,000 barrels a day.

The incident is another black mark for an ambitious energy company ridiculed earlier this month by U.S. safety officials, who likened Enbridge workers to the Keystone Kops. The comparison came after an investigation of a broken pipeline that released more than 800,000 gallons of heavy crude near Marshall, Mich. — one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history and certainly the most expensive.

The new spill, in sparsely populated Adams County, Wis., forced the evacuation of two homes. It is the company’s worst spill since the 2010 disaster, and it drew the ire of U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

“Enbridge is fast becoming to the Midwest what BP was to the Gulf of Mexico, posing troubling risks to the environment,” Markey said in a statement. “The company must be forthcoming about this entire incident, and deserves a top-to-bottom review of their safety culture, procedures and standards.”

The corporate coup d’etat in Wisconsin is harder to ignore since June 5 when Scott Walker was deemed winner of the recall election. The veil is being lifted on the identities of the people who have their hands on the levers of power in the state and the economic interests they represent.

The letter offers a rare glimpse of the inner workings of corporate influence in Wisconsin politics and illustrates several points:

1) That lobbyists and the businesses that pay their salaries believe they control the legislative process;

2) That consolidation of power within a certain corporate faction – namely the defense manufacturing and resource-extractive industries – is nearly complete. Total domination of the state apparatus only requires two more senate seats;

3) That even the people promoting the Gogebic Taconite project themselves realize that it is not viable unless extraordinary de-regulatory measures are taken to subsidize it; and

4) That they believe the very purpose of the legislative process is to do the bidding of wealthy corporations. Continue reading →

Time running out on our ability to preserve a livable world.

Is it just me, or has it been a little warm around here lately? Or warmer earlier? The early and unusually mild spring here in Wisconsin may be nature’s way of reminding us that the clock is ticking on climate change and we need to take action before it’s too late.

While stationed in Kangerlussuac, Greenland, 50 years ago, I noted my airbase was 4 miles west of the Russell Glacier grinding down from the ice cap. Looking at today’s satellite images, this glacier has retreated to the east toward the ice cap, easily noted from the satellite. The retreat averages 1,000 feet per year, producing a torrent of melt water that flows down the fjord and to the sea.

Glacial retreat is one indicator that global warming is taking its toll. Today, in more populated areas of the earth, disappearing glaciers are responsible for drought, loss of irrigation water and less drinking water. As much as 54 cubic miles of ice disappear each year in Antarctica, 24 cubic miles per year in Greenland. As this ice melts, ocean levels rise and coastal regions flood.

Centuries of rising CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases have raised the Earth thermostat. Irish scientist John Tyndall discovered CO2’s threat as a heat trapping greenhouse gas in the mid-19th century. In the 1950s, Dr. Charles Keeling began meticulous measurement of atmospheric CO2 levels at Mt. Muana Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Keeling and his son, Ralph, documented the steady buildup of CO2, which stood at 315 parts per million (ppm) worldwide when they started and is now 392 ppm.

Whiteclay, NE – Activists from across the country participated in an act of civil disobedience in the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska. Members of Deep Green Resistance, Unoccupy Albuquerque, Occupy Lincoln, and Lakota organizers attached U-Locks to their necks and strung a chain between pairs of activists, blockading the road running through the town to bring attention to the town’s infamous liquor industry. After blocking the main road running through the town for 3 and a half hours, police agreed to work with Lakota women to investigate the plethora of crimes and abuses committed by the owners of the four alcohol peddlers in Whiteclay.

In addition to the blockade, the Lakota women posted eviction notices, which gave the alcohol stores 30 days to change their business and stop selling alcohol. The organizers are also determined to take on the brewers who supply the stores.

“The action in Whiteclay is the first in a series of assaults that will ensure that the poisons of Anheiser-Busch and Coors do not infect another Generation of Our Lakota here within Our homelands,” said Olowan Martinez, one of the Lakota organizers of the action.

Speaking on the strong stand taken by herself and other Lakota women, Martinez said “We the life-givers of this Nation are expecting in 30 days of June 9,2012 that these businesses are to agree to change their type of Business. If they refuse to do so, We, the Women will consider it a breach of peace against Our future generations. It is our responsibility as Life Givers of the Lakota Nation to protect Our Future by any means necessary, not only in Whiteclay Nebraska, but also the border towns of Interior, Gordon, Martin, Boondocks, Rushville, and Olreichs.”

The four liquor stores in Whiteclay (a town with a population of 14) act with chronic illegality and a total lack of ethical concern. The stores repeatedly violate the terms of their liquor licenses on the daily bases by allowing on premise consumption of alcohol as well as selling to those who are intoxicated. The liquor stores of White Clay are notorious for selling to minors, and it is common knowledge that the dealers sell alcohol for sexual favors and sexually assault women.

The act of civil disobedience took place after the 2012 March for Justice, an annual march from Pine Ridge to Whiteclay in memory of the victims of Whiteclay, including Loren & Wally Black Elk and Ron Hard Heart. Several hundred participated in the march, demanding justice for the countless victim’s of Whiteclay’s alcohol. As the march came to a close, seven activists locked themselves together and blocked the single road running through the town of Whiteclay. The action cost the liquor businesses an estimated $1000 in liquor sales in the ongoing struggle against alcohol-fueled genocide of the Oglala Lakota.

“Deep Green Resistance is here today to stand with the Oglala Lakota people against Whiteclay, which is an instrumental piece of the ongoing genocide of the Lakota people and their culture. As allies, we are here to put our bodies on the line in solidarity with their struggle,” said T.R. McKenzie, a participant in the lockdown and coordinator of Deep Green Resistance Great Plains.

The blockade ended after the police signed a written agreement, promising to meet and work with the Lakota women on a joint-investigation into the rampant illegal activity and abuse of the Whiteclay alcohol stores. Provided with the opportunity to have a direct impact on the alcohol infrastructure of Whiteclay the blockade was concluded.

Justice is far from complete, and Whiteclay continues to enable and enact the destruction of the Oglala Lakota and the people of Pine Ridge. The continued subjugation of the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation will not end as long as the liquor stores in Whiteclay continue to operate. If the concessions granted do not bring about the change demanded by the Lakota women, or if those in power do not live up to their end of the bargain within 30 days, escalation in this struggle will continue.